Do Newspapers Still Need Copy Editors?

Philip M. Stone January 21, 2010 Follow on Twitter

The complaints keep coming into the Washington Post and other newspapers that more and more sloooppy editing is finding its way into print, and most newspapers are honest enough to admit one primary reason for that is that they’ve got rid of most of their copy editors. So, is fixing mispellings and the like worth the cost?

This column picked up last July on Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander’s lament that there were increasing numbers of spelling and grammatical mistakes in The Post and he squarely put the cause down to a loss of copy editors. The errors are continuing, getting even more frequent, and with complaints on the rise Alexander addressed the issue again last Sunday.

He told about stories in which a soldier was described as wearing “shiny new boats” when it should have been “boots”, about an accident story where the driver “slammed on the breaks” (should have been “brakes”) and of course, that old bugaboo of using “principles” when it should be “principals” and vice-versa, not to mention the country of Cypress (Cyprus) … the list goes on but you get the general idea.

Alexander gave a couple of reasons why the errors are on the increase. First, there are fewer copy editors. There used to be 75 but over the years that is now down to 43. And secondly their job description has greatly expanded which means there is far less time for detecting errors in print copy. Now the priority is to write headlines that will grab Web attention and to come up with the right keyword search words for Web optimization. That’s the price of having an integrated newsroom where everyone works for all platforms.

Alexander says some help is on the way. This week the entire newsroom goes through search engine optimization training that should take some of the load off copy editors, and improved software in the future should help with the spelling, punctuation, catching those words with dual meanings and the like. But as it stands now The Post cut way back on copy editing positions, and expanded the job specifications for those remaining, and readers have noticed the deterioration and have taken the time to complain. Not the reputation a so-called quality paper wants.

But it is not just The Post that seems to believe copy editors are expendable. The Toronto Star had announced in November it was going to outsource editing and would then get rid of those 78 people who now did the editing. The news media guild objected and the newspaper has now decided to keep editing in-house but still some 43 newsroom jobs will go.

And just last week The Minneapolis Star Tribune – fresh out of bankruptcy – said it wanted to buy out 18 of 24 staffers in its “A-scale copy editing category.”  News editors had apparently told management they want to keep all newsroom people who actually collect the news, meaning those who edit the news were expendable.

The newspaper guild says it understands the “difficult challenges facing our industry” and has written to Editor Nancy Barnes that instead of just going after copy editors a proposed buyout should be open to the entire newsroom. “We believe that retaining some editing and production positions would make the transition to a smaller operation smoother and less traumatic to those employees remaining,” the union wrote. No response yet from management.

One reason publishers like to go after copy editors is because they are usually older and are at the top of the pay scale. Once you run out of steam being a reporter it’s off to the copy desk for many! In Minneapolis, for instance, the guild says the elimination of the “A scale category” of 24 staffers would represent  424 years of service and that averages close to 18 years per employee – top union pay scale wages!

This writer confesses a fondness for copy editing. When newly graduated from San Jose State College in California some 40 years ago – can it really be that long? – the local daily PM paper, The San Jose News, gave him a job at all of $110 a week before deductions. The former editor of the Spartan Daily  newspaper on campus, and armed with a BA with honors in journalism  the young journalist was sure that meant a plumb reporting role, so imagine his surprise when the managing editor announced that for the next three months he would be working on the copy desk. Unbelieveable!

Now this was in the days when reporters used typewriters and wire copy was transmitted on paper and tape – front end systems, as they were to be called, were still a gleam in someone’s eyes. You were told what font headline was needed, how many columns and you started counting “1”s and “1 ½’s” on scratch paper until you came up with the best headline that would fit. And with a chain-smoking copy desk tyrant like Ben Phillips running the show you learned your craft real fast – he took no prisoners!

Not much you could do in editing the wire copy because editing meant the tape couldn’t be used and that did not please the back shop, so usually wire editing was done just for length. But you could go after the local reporters’ stories with a vengeance which is one reason why reporters tend to try and make friends with the copy desk as priority number 1. Truth be told, and the college won’t like this, this writer probably learned more about journalism in that three months on the copy desk than he did in four years of college!

This writer graduated to reporting and he will never forget coming back from lunch one day with the managing editor standing at his desk with his face so red you thought he was going to explode.  In a story written about a “warehouse” fire the young reporter had spelt it incorrectly as “wharehouse”, the copy desk missed it, and the typesetter had turned it into “whorehouse” and that’s the way it showed up in print. The ME was not amused!

At Reuters many years later in marketing roles, this writer was proud to go around telling subscribers how efficiently every piece of copy was edited. “Two pair of eyes” was the rule before anything hit the wire (what the Reuters journalists used to say about their editing brethren is another story probably best left untold!). And then direct filing hit. The problem was not so much with the reporters as it was with the photographers. Their captions with all the typos, grammatical mistakes and whatever else you could think never really had mattered too much before because the public never got to see that although it was embarrassing sometimes before client editors. But direct filing onto the Web changed all that. Let’s just say Web readers on reuters.com and on other sites that took direct photo feeds quickly learned that photographers are not the greatest spellers in the world! It may have been funny sometimes but it was not what the brand needed.

Sure, you can get along without copy editors if you don’t care about putting out a quality product. Publishers need to save money but at what price quality? Don’t think for one moment that the public doesn’t notice mistakes. They may not always say something, but they notice and that is not the kind of viral advertising newspapers and news organizations need.